In this episode Kate O'Neill shares her insights on the strength gained from cross-cultural connections and the importance of intentional communication in fostering understanding and unity.
Guest: Kate O'Neill, Dean, College of Business, American University of Iraq-Baghdad
On LinkedIn | https://www.linkedin.com/in/k-kathleen-oneill-phd-strategicleadership/
Hosts:
Alejandro Juárez Crawford
On ITSPmagazine 👉 https://www.itspmagazine.com/itspmagazine-podcast-radio-hosts/alejandro-juarez-crawford
Miriam Plavin-Masterman
On ITSPmagazine 👉 https://www.itspmagazine.com/itspmagazine-podcast-radio-hosts/miriam-plavin-masterman
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Episode Introduction
Kate, the Dean of the College of Business at American University in Iraq, Baghdad, draws from her extensive international experience to discuss:
- The importance of being self-aware of cultural assumptions.
- Strategies for bridging cultural differences, including explicitly stating intentions.
- The concept of semantic non-equivalence in cross-cultural contexts.
- How intentional communication can overcome cultural barriers.
- The paradox of finding unity in diversity and division in similarity. and lot more!
The episode concludes with reflections on the importance of listening, sharing personal experiences, and finding common ground even in the face of significant differences.
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Resources
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For more podcast stories from What If Instead? Podcast with Alejandro Juárez Crawford and Miriam Plavin-Masterman, visit: https://www.itspmagazine.com/itspmagazine-podcast-radio-hosts/alejandro-juarez-crawford and https://www.itspmagazine.com/itspmagazine-podcast-radio-hosts/miriam-plavin-masterman
The Muscles We Build by Bridging | A conversation with Kate O'Neill | What If Instead? Podcast with Alejandro Juárez Crawford and Miriam Plavin-Masterman
Alejandro Juárez Crawford (00:00)
Mim, you were saying something to me about your mother's idea of intelligence. And it made me think how clearly not that smart I was as a teenager when I thought that the more complicated I could make a concept, the more arcane I could connect the wires between ideas.
the more sophisticated I was being.
Mim Plavin-Masterman (00:31)
That's definitely a kind of intelligence. I mean, no, no. I mean, it's a, I mean, it's a, it's a way of showing people how smart you are, putting yourself at some distance from them. Right. But my, yeah, my mom's, my mom's, one of her big ways of describing intelligence is when you're able to take something really complicated and make it very understandable and very straightforward.
Alejandro Juárez Crawford (00:35)
To put it charitably, kind of not that smart intelligence going on
Mm -hmm.
Mim Plavin-Masterman (00:59)
that you can be a PhD student talking to a third grader and the third grader will completely understand you because you've just said what you said in a very clear, direct way. So, I mean, my mom's usually right. If you're listening to this, hi, mom. Yeah.
Alejandro Juárez Crawford (01:16)
Yeah.
I mean, I'm so curious what our guest today would say about this, who's been in so many contexts where she's broken down difficult concepts, including for me. But it makes me think of the Socratic dialogues, right? And the idea that you could, that we've actually got hard concepts within us and we can draw them out
if we're really good. But why, I want to ask you, are we so tempted to try to make things seem more complex than they are or than they need to be?
Mim Plavin-Masterman (02:03)
I mean, if that's a real question, my cynical answer is because it makes it easier to say, we can't solve it.
Alejandro Juárez Crawford (02:13)
Huh, so by obfuscating, by over-complicating something, it's not just pyrotechnics, it's actually, it's kind of an evasion. It takes me off the hook from actually having to connect with people collaboratively to do something about it.
Mim Plavin-Masterman (02:34)
Or if the problem, if you just keep making the problem more and more complex, then eventually people will throw up their hands and be like, well, I guess we can't solve this. That's a very cynical take, but.
Alejandro Juárez Crawford (02:43)
Huh, man, there's so.
There's so many directions we could take this from. the counter argument that I've heard Noam Chomsky make that a concept that's unfamiliar to us takes more words and a concept that's really concise has to be one that's pre -packaged and with which we're already familiar. So that might be a counter argument. Nevertheless, I think you're right. think this ability to build a bridge from
one set of symbols, one sort of figure for an idea in one terminology to another, especially if it's across disciplines or cultures, is one of the most challenging activities there is. And I'm always humbled by people who can do that. Now, speaking of people who make me feel humble, I'm really excited to stop talking about this or continue talking about this with our guest today.
And she's someone that I'm just thrilled to think I get to hear what she's about to say, which is kind of a fun feeling, not to put you on the spot or anything. I'm Alejandro Juarez Crawford. My co -host is Mim Plevin, Masterman, and we're on a mission to make experiments of your own feel as normal as watching videos on your phone.
Welcome to What If Instead? The Podcast.
Mim Plavin-Masterman (04:22)
So today we have someone who's actually built a lot of bridges, I would say, across many cultures, many places, many times. And her name is Kate O 'Neill. She is currently the Dean of the College of Business in American University in Iraq and Baghdad. Before joining AUB, she held the position of Dean, School of Business at American International University in Kuwait. She also had worked as Associate Professor of Management at American University of Afghanistan in Kabul. She's lived in multiple countries.
including Guatemala, Japan, the Emirates, Afghanistan, Kuwait, Iraq. I'm probably leaving some off the list. Um, and we're very excited to have her here today. One of the questions I had for you as I was looking through your background and looking at all the places you've been and all the things you've done is what led you to go to those places and do those, those things? Like what made you say, I'm going to go live in the middle East for 10 or 15 years and work in some of the most
dangerous potentially places and make this great life for myself and my students?
Kate O'Neill (05:31)
Well, thanks for having me here today. You you started off talking about complexity and simplicity, and I really wish I could give a simple answer to your question, but I fear it's gonna be a little more complex than I'd like. So there are a couple of threads or
forces that that drew me into this. The first is my childhood. I grew up with the world at my dinner table. My mother was a nurse at a local college. They had a large international student population. As a nurse, she had a lot of international students come in who were homesick.
And so her solution was, well, if they're homesick, they need a home. So she brought them home. And it would not be uncommon to have five or 10 different nationalities sitting around the dinner table from the time I was a child.
Alejandro Juárez Crawford (06:35)
Wait, can we just stop for one second and like, since this is all about the moms here at the beginning of this episode, they were homesick. When you're homesick, you needed a home, so she brought them home. Go on, please.
Kate O'Neill (06:37)
Sorry.
Yes. Exactly. So, the world was, as I said, it was at my dinner table. It didn't seem like a foreign or far away place. It almost seemed inevitable that I would venture out. So I think that's part of it. and then as I got older, I think
a lot of it was seeing divisiveness in the world and really coming to realize, pulling out of that experience growing up, that it's really difficult to engage in violence with someone when you've seen pictures of their kids, when you heard stories about their moms. And so that sort of drove me
to want to help promote that piece one person at a time. And as a mom myself now, I'm really determined to create a safer, better world for my children and other mothers' children, quite honestly. And also it's fun. It's really interesting and fun too.
Alejandro Juárez Crawford (08:09)
not to take away from this.
I think sometimes we lose that sense of generations. I remember many years ago being in this awful political argument with someone I knew in her part of New York State.
And then we got together with a big dinner with multiple generations. And suddenly, this might sound surprising, but suddenly that huge knockdown, drag out argument we were having was softened. It was ameliorated. And it was as if because we were automatically bridging across these generations, that was our job. We stopped just standing each on our side of the river, throwing stones at each other.
Kate O'Neill (08:57)
I think the paradoxically, think complexity can lead to simplicity. know, going back to your earlier comment, when I'm teaching communication with my students, and very often, of course, they want to get complex and they confuse complexity with depth or
being profound and I always share with them, you know, E equals MC squared. It is the simplest, you know, the communication of such a profound concept. And so I think, you know, what you just described, Ale, is just that, that complexity can lead to simplicity and that complexity of generations and dynamics
sort of creates a through line that people can see and follow.
Alejandro Juárez Crawford (10:00)
You're making me think about now complexity and simplicity, as antipode, not as another word here, not as opposites fighting with each other, but instead as
ends of a pendulum that we need to keep going back and forth between so that when we have a complex idea, we're working, especially if we need to work with people who have another background, right? We're building software and we need to deal with designers and programmers and business people, whatever it is. We need to translate the part we understand, right? I spent the last few hours with a multi-decade Google alum who was explaining things to me
that I wouldn't begin to touch technically in terms I could understand. I felt this gratitude. It was so obvious that he was using his intelligence in this highway to take things which he understood technically and make them relevant to me as someone who needed to understand well enough to use these concepts, even if I wouldn't be able to execute them, right? So that's sort of the pendulum going one way and pendulum's probably the wrong figure. Let's stick with it for a second, where I'm working from a complicated idea to make it translatable.
And then I think sometimes it goes the other way, where we've oversimplified. We've come up with a way of describing something that seems so good, right? It's that cliche, it's that paradigm, it's that word package that everybody gets. And so we have to complicate it. We have to push at it because it's as if its simplicity has become unearned. And so we need to pull out its wires again and keep going back and forth.
Kate O'Neill (11:41)
Yeah, I mean, I would agree there is a real paradox there in the cross-cultural, multicultural environment where there's so much difference. Very often, as I know the two of you have experienced as well, we get a simplicity, we get a congruence and an alignment and an agreement, whereas, and not to delve into politics, but, you know,
in a country that should be so united with so many more similarities that we have with each other in the States, then we have differences, but yet we're so divisive right now. And I think that's really one of the through lines that I have
learned and picked up on and is a commonality throughout my work, whether it's researching or consulting or teaching in the classroom or leading is this concept of paradox and trying to help people not only understand it but also get comfortable with it, hopefully, because a lot of people are very uncomfortable with this concept.
Mim Plavin-Masterman (13:08)
So I wanted to pick up on something that you had said in addition to this idea, the paradox. So you're doing a lot of work, literally and metaphorically translating concepts across cultures, across... What are some of the concepts that are most translatable? And what makes them most translatable? And all the time that you've been teaching overseas. I'm just curious about commonality.
Alejandro Juárez Crawford (13:32)
And you tell us a story. Can you tell us a story of that translation Mim's asking about?
Kate O'Neill (13:39)
I can actually. So my research, a lot of it is on everyday concepts of leadership. What does leadership mean to your average person? The store clerk, the middle, more entry level manager. And several years ago, I was doing some work in Qatar.
And we were trying to identify, is there a culturally implicit leadership theory of the Arabian Gulf? Identified there is, it's called collegiate leadership. But while I'm doing this, I'm in a focus group. And the Qatari participants, we were asking, what are the traits of an effective leader from
the Qatari perspective? And they said, well, friendly, a leader is friendly. And if we look at the Globe study, we see friendliness as one of their 21 universal traits. But the interesting thing is what does friendly mean in Qatar? Because friendly is not the same concept. It's not operationalized the same way in the US as it is in China or Argentina or in Qatar.
Mim Plavin-Masterman (14:57)
Mm -hmm.
Kate O'Neill (15:08)
And she said, well, I'll give you an example. I said, please do. And she said, well, there was a fire. My house burned down, which was devastating. She said, no, it's okay. When I showed up for work the next day, my boss had left the keys to one of his other houses on my desk and my family, moved in. And I went, okay. And this was early on in my careers of research or not.
early on in my experience as an expat, but as a researcher. So I hadn't really had the depth of thought or analysis prior that I had to this. that was really enlightening to me. This idea when you talk about translation that again, there's this idea of semantic non -equivalence. And I teach that a lot with my students.
not just internationally, but even in the US with other US students that just because we're using a word or a term doesn't mean we define it or understand it or experience it the same way. And I think that's really key in leadership and in effective leadership, particularly when we talk about compassion as an essential part of being a leader is, what does this mean to you? And how do you experience it so that I can be
compassionate to understand you, but then also to help you move beyond it.
Alejandro Juárez Crawford (16:40)
I'm fascinated as you speak, by two things. One is where there is semantic non-equivalence, right? Where you and I look up at the moon and see two different things and need to tell each other what we're seeing, right? How do we make a mapping between my moon and your moon? That's sort of the first thing I'd love to delve into. The second has to do with that paradox you described
with shared experience we're divided and with separate experience we find ways to bridge.
And maybe if you're like me and you grew up in Mr. Rogers, you have one idea of neighborliness. think Francois from Mr. Rogers.
sing with my dad in real life, right? So that's neighborliness, but if it's something that my mother has often given people things when they've complimented them in our house. And from some cultures that makes people very uncomfortable, but my mom had to explain to me that my mom's, we were Mexican -American by descent, and my mom said that's our Indio background, right? Because that's just something that's really deep in our culture. I can't stop doing it, right?
And so that was her way. And what I'm trying to get at, this idea of like, each of us have a way of saying to you, you're my neighbor, won't you be my neighbor, right? And which is an even better statement now that I think about it. And I haven't thought about this since I watched that show at age four or whatever, right? It's not saying you're already my neighbor and I claim you as my neighbor saying, you, it's an invitation to be my neighbor. So I'm just trying to think about the ways in which that can mistranslate and translate.
Thanks for letting me just explore that for a moment. I want to hear what you two
Kate O'Neill (18:29)
Yeah, so one of the things I've learned in my experience is to be very self -aware of my own cultural assumptions and behaviors. And so if I walk into a situation where I'm not culturally sure or perhaps I'm meeting somebody for the first time and they may be culturally unsure with me,
all own the uncertainty. you know, I will walk in. I did this many times when I was new here in Iraq with my faculty and said, excuse me, but I need to be very American right now. I'm going to ask you directly and I'm going to need a yes, no answer because I don't know you well enough to understand if you communicate with me in a very polite way in Arabic, being indirect.
Alejandro Juárez Crawford (19:27)
Wait, that's amazing. So you highlighted the cultural assumption that was implicit in what you were doing.
Kate O'Neill (19:28)
I love
Absolutely, I call it straight out and I've done that for a very long time and I found for me at least that's very effective. It brings a little humor and levity. It also warns people that if I make a mistake, it was not intentional, but it also gives people permission to make a teachable moment. And a lot of people have been so generous.
in telling me, we'll do this, don't do that, we say this, this is the appropriate thing, which has helped me be more effective in my work and in my relationships, but also more comfortable in my life. I've been very, very fortunate as a guest in other people's countries, other people's homes, that people have been amazingly hospitable
almost every way, especially with taking the time to teach me, to correct me, to give me guidance and advice.
Alejandro Juárez Crawford (20:41)
What an amazing full circle from your mother's statement that I repeated, right? Now that you're there and they're bringing you in to give you that. I love this idea and I just want to accentuate it that you put it right out there. The way in which you're going to be very direct right now because that's your cultural way of doing, which might be interpreted differently in this home culture. My study group in business school was majority people who
lived in Japan. And they said, I have never lived in Japan, so I couldn't make the statement. So but the three of them said, you have to understand to the two Americans in the group that we're not going to say no directly. Right. And so we started to make it sort of something we would bring out consciously. And we'd be like, wait a minute, Takesh, you really mean no way this is the worst idea you've ever heard
but you're not gonna actually say, no way, this is the worst idea I've never heard of the way I would, right? And just by putting it out there directly, it became this fun thing actually between all of us as opposed to this super awkward thing where I couldn't tell they were like, I like, no, no, no.
Mim Plavin-Masterman (21:57)
I it. I wanted to follow up on something that you had said though about this idea of when you lead with I'm an American, I'm going to act this way. Is it, maybe rephrase my question. How different is it to act in that way as an American in the Emirates or Afghanistan or Kuwait or?
Baghdad in Iraq. Like, are there things where everyone understands what you mean, or are there sort of flavors of being American that become more or less pronounced in these different countries?
Kate O'Neill (22:35)
think there's a common baseline and right or wrongly, it comes from the media. The world is familiar with common American mannerisms. And I say American with trepidation and hesitation because it's not a unitary thing.
Alejandro Juárez Crawford (23:02)
We're not necessarily Ross and Chandler on Friends, right? Like we do sometimes diverge from those characters,
Kate O'Neill (23:05)
Yeah!
Exactly. But there are some stereotypical commonalities that are based out of truth. We tend to be quite direct. We generally do not pick up on high context, subtle communication like with the Japanese, know, communicate very clearly no, but may not say no directly.
And so these are the sorts of things that I will highlight when I want to, one, show people I'm open to learning, to show people that I don't understand things, that I am going to make mistakes, that I don't mean to be disrespectful if I am in any way. Again, bring a little levity, but also
it does clear those communication channels so that, you know, so many relationships across cultures never have a real opportunity to blossom because there are some microaggressions, unintended, perhaps even in people are unaware of them. And, you you start off with, I'm just uncomfortable with that person. I don't like that person. And then the relationship never gets off off the
So, and I'm not saying that everybody should do what I do. I've just found for myself, I have been an expat now for 41 years and it works for me. And as I said, but people know Americans are direct. Americans don't tend
Alejandro Juárez Crawford (24:53)
Mm -hmm.
Kate O'Neill (25:02)
pick up on subtlety very well. We may be a little bit loud. We tend to repeat ourselves as I'm doing here.
Alejandro Juárez Crawford (25:12)
Yeah. Though sometimes we're on the other side of that too. I, for many years, worked with a client who, his family was Greek on one side, Ukrainian on the other. And he claimed that when the families would get together, what was seen as just passion on the Greek side was often seen as intense anger and even aggression sometimes on the other
Mim Plavin-Masterman (25:13)
I don't know.
Alejandro Juárez Crawford (25:42)
And so interestingly, like so far we've been examples where in the US we tend to be direct. In my own relationship, sometimes it's just expression of excitement or passion or just the normal way you would talk seems to me like, whoa, right? And that is something that to your wonderful point, I have to reinterpret, right? It's no different than.
and some software is saying, like, I have to say, actually, that is this. I need to map what's being expressed to something else that's being signified, not to sound like I'm going to get in semiotics, I promise, after the way we opened this conversation. But maybe we could use that after either of you or both of you add to this point to get back at that paradox, because I think we've actually come full circle there in a very interesting
This is me pausing very intentionally. I have to count. So you talked, Kate, about how sometimes in our shared experience, we find ourselves very divided. And with people where we have to bridge from the beginning, like in all these examples we're talking about, as in all these examples are talking about, we find we build bridges. And you made me think a lot about the work of bridging.
the muscles we build by bridging. And then as you spoke more, I said, and also the play involved in bridging, right? So when I, so I work with this group of people from all over the world, as you know, and many of, some of them have even been guests on this podcast. And the amazing thing is that we will take time to explain these things to each other. We'll talk about, you know, what it's like to eat food in our, you know, in our home, or we'll talk about,
an expression that makes no sense to anyone except in our culture if you say it literally. And because we're doing all this work, two great things happen. One, we're already involved in that activity, right? It's like if you haven't walked, you get bad at walking, right? And by doing that kind of walking together, it just becomes what we do. So amazingly, and we all comment on this, though we've met just a couple of times, most
We're incredibly close because we did that work, we built those muscles, and the really good thing is we got so good at it that we started to play together, and that's when it really starts
Kate O'Neill (28:21)
Yeah, I I think you bring up a really good point, which is when we're aware of the differences, there's an intentionality that allows us to bridge them or to overcome them. Whereas I think when we are in a very homogeneous environment or what perhaps we assume to be a homogeneous environment, like being an American in the US.
Alejandro Juárez Crawford (28:44)
Good points.
Kate O'Neill (28:49)
we make assumptions about people understanding the world the same way we do, about people using terms and understanding them the same way, having the same experience. And then when they don't behave the way we expect, when they don't react the way we expect, they don't have the same impression we do.
It jars us, it shocks us because we're not expecting the difference. We're expecting similarity. And I think that's where that jarring, that unpleasant surprise of difference where we expected similarity, you know, turns into fear and confusion and threat and, you know, breeds divisiveness.
Whereas perhaps if we acted a little bit more like we need to when we're in a cross -cultural environment to assume people are different and to behave with more intentionality, maybe we might be a bit more successful, but that's exhausting to do. To live your life that way all the time, all day is,
exhausting. It requires effort, as you stated. It's a lot of
Alejandro Juárez Crawford (30:13)
Or maybe it's work unless we start playing. I don't mean to push this concept too hard, but I find that again, like exercise, it's exhausting when you start, but then it has its own energy to it. And sometimes I think that process of bridging, which we all need to do. My favorite thing you just did, Kate, was you said, or that we assume our homogeneous environments, because how much homogeneity really is there? What do I
mean, Mim and I have known each other for a long time, right? And we work very closely with each other. And there is a little bit of like we're on the same improv team that comes out of that, where it's like, well, I was just about to say that, and that's amazing. But I think it would be very dangerous if I started to assume that I knew, Mim, where you were going with a concept. That would be very different from listening closely and being excited when you just simply finished the
Mim Plavin-Masterman (30:44)
since two.
Alejandro Juárez Crawford (31:13)
saying or
Mim Plavin-Masterman (31:15)
fair. I think it might think the other way around too. But I want to get actually get to the point that you had made and then that Kate had made this point about bridging that like the more you do it, the better that you get at it. And maybe it doesn't get all the way to play, but it gets easier. The work feels less hard. So
Alejandro Juárez Crawford (31:17)
HAHAHA!
Mim Plavin-Masterman (31:41)
Because I guess I would respectfully push back and say, you might never want it to feel like play because of the intentionality of the work that you're doing. Like you don't want to lose sight of the mission or the goal. And if it gets too playful, maybe you are a little too far from
Alejandro Juárez Crawford (31:57)
Can we fight about that for a second? Because sometimes I think when you're playing well with people, you couldn't be more on goal. Meaning, I don't think I need, I don't mean play as like, I got lazy and I started to assume things and I had no intention. I mean, what is more intentional than people when they're in game
Mim Plavin-Masterman (32:16)
But I'm thinking about my intentionality. I'm so focused on the game flow and not so focused on the thing we're trying to get to, I think that I might be less effective as someone in that bridging position. But maybe that's not your experience. don't know. Kate, what do you think?
Kate O'Neill (32:37)
Well, I guess I'm team play on this one. In the sense because we know, I mean, you know, child development. mean, children learn through play. Play is hard work. It is a primary mechanism of learning is play. So I would say it is important because when we do play,
It is learning. mean, I think you learn a lot more about your colleagues, you know, playing Monopoly with them than perhaps you do sitting at the lunch table.
Alejandro Juárez Crawford (33:14)
Kate, you don't know this, but Mim and her family reinvented monopoly. Just throwing that out there. Go
Kate O'Neill (33:19)
All right. So I would say that that's quite important in that respect. And we also, I mean, we acknowledge socially the role of play in creating unity. It's why professional sports are so important. It is something, while we might not be playing, we are engaged in the act
when we're cheering for a team with people who we might disagree with on everything else in life. It's why game shows on television are so popular. it's, you know, three generations could sit down and watch Wheel of Fortune together. And it creates a bonding experience that everybody can engage in at different levels, but it's still a shared experience.
No, but getting back to your point, Mim, you know, in the workplace, yes, we do need to differentiate between playfulness and play. And that is one of the things to me that as always a guest in a host country environment, work leading teams, I mean, my team right now, I think has 12 different nationalities on it.
I've led teams with 20 plus different nationalities. And for me, the ultimate demonstration that we are a team, we are effective, we have gelled, is when people are playful with each other. When you get that little teasing because now you have superseded the cultural and connected.
at the personal.
Alejandro Juárez Crawford (35:15)
Kate, it's as if you just decided to demonstrate what you were saying 10 minutes ago, because what you just did was show that Mim and I might have been using the word play in two perhaps overlapping or perhaps divergent ways. And now you've just done this thing. You say, well, what does it mean to be playful? What does it mean to be playing? Right. My brother will watch my wife and me play backgammon. And I'll be
you hang out by competing with each other in this intense way? He thinks we're crazy. We might be crazy. You also, you gave me this shock a moment ago when you were talking about Monopoly because I made that comment about my mom. I've never said that publicly, giving stuff away to our guests and making folks not from our culture sometimes. Like, how do I say no, right? In Monopoly, Mim, I don't think we...
we talked about this when this came up on this podcast, this game, my mother would give us all her houses and hotels, like routinely. She'd just be like, take mine. I don't know. We barely knew. It was amazing. So I want to bring up this concept of explore and exploit, right? And we've talked about this on One Up Instead before where a child, right? I learned about this from Alison Gopnik, the child psychologist. A child will explore.
And in her example, that can make it very difficult when you have to wait for that child to put on its shoes for 40 minutes or something like that, right? Adults get good at exploiting, which means we know how we're going to do it. We do it efficiently. We know the cliche we're going to use, jargon to use, you know what I mean. You know, let's circle back to that topic or one of these horrible things. And it's quick, it's efficient, but it can be a trap because if we just exploit, we stop exploring. So I don't know
if you want to go deeper down this road, but as we've now been talking about commonality, you made me think that the efficiency of shared reference points is that we can use these short hands and exploit, but that what's lost there may be the exploration.
Kate O'Neill (37:27)
Yeah, mean, well, there's a lot to unpack with that. Yeah, I mean, in you and I, we've had this conversation before that, you know, in business, in organizations, know, leadership and management is my field. So I spend a lot of time with students, with consulting clients.
just in my own practice leading a college, thinking about efficiency and effectiveness. And, you know, we've talked about before that maybe we don't need to think about these as being
competing forces, but how perhaps can we realign that they're contributors to other greater values that we may share, you know, like the stewardship of our organizations. And again, this to me comes back to the original, you know, conversation we're having this idea of
Alejandro Juárez Crawford (38:26)
Yeah.
Kate O'Neill (38:41)
being purposeful in sharing our thoughts and in the way we communicate with others. And really, I think this whole conversation, when we get down to it, is about values. And it's about finding the shared values, even if we express them differently, like friendship. Is friendship buying somebody a coffee or is friendship giving them the keys to your extra house?
you know, and, you know, but, finding those, those, the purpose of, of this, intentionality is to find those shared values that allow us to bridge, you know, those differences, to work together, to see the commonalities.
Alejandro Juárez Crawford (39:38)
So you mean like I might signal it differently from you and your culture or to your point about assumptions in your group within New York City, right? Your family, but we mean you are welcome. You are appreciated. We are here for you that those are the universal things which we signal in distinct ways.
Kate O'Neill (40:01)
Yeah, I mean, it makes me think, I remember being invited to dinner one night when I was in the UAE and UAE hospitality, Emirati hospitality, and my experience has just been amazing. And people always, you know,
a sign of wonderful hospitalities to give you way more food than you could ever eat, to have way more food on the table than anybody could ever consume. Now, coming back to my mother, if I were to show up at somebody's house for dinner without bringing something to contribute, would just be the height of rude.
So, but bringing food to an Emirati's house is like saying, well, you're too poor. You can't afford to feed me. It's a major insult. So I showed up with brownies. and before I walked in, I said, you need to understand in the United States, this is our tradition. My mother will know somehow if I have shown up at your door.
And so again, with playfulness, I was able to, of course I'm laughing and I'm smiling and I'm explaining this. And they understood that it was not an insult to their culture. It was me sharing my culture. It was me showing respect through my cultural lens.
They laughed about it and then every time I was invited back to dinner, they're like, and you're bringing brownies, right? Little do they know my husband. Yeah.
Alejandro Juárez Crawford (41:47)
I love it. you developed that. But this is amazing because it's showing that like it's not just the codes were given, you're developing a code between yourselves, right? Where, you're bringing brownies, right? Or what I described with my majority Japanese study group, these things that become little points of reference. And suddenly we know what we mean because we're building that shared structure of reference. By the way, we always look for a great line from these for
this episode is definitely, as your mother said, that's the title, clearly. That's right. Listen to your mother with Kate O 'Neil.
Mim Plavin-Masterman (42:20)
Or it could just be listen to your mother. hi mom. Yeah, yeah. Then people will be like, I don't know what this podcast is, but I'm in. Like, yeah.
Kate O'Neill (42:25)
Works for me.
Alejandro Juárez Crawford (42:33)
This is the Dean of AUIB's business school and so she has a number of insights. First and foremost, listen to your mother.
Kate O'Neill (42:33)
Yeah.
Boys, are you listening? My three sons.
Alejandro Juárez Crawford (42:44)
That's right. my
Mim Plavin-Masterman (42:45)
You
So I know we're trying to be playful with the purpose here, so bear with me. This is my attempt to do a little bridging. I'm really curious about your students. I'm really curious about who they are, what they're trying to do, where they're trying to go, and how you're helping them macro as dean of the college, but then more micro in classes.
Kate O'Neill (43:20)
So my students are amazing. They're my heroes. I mean, they are choosing to do a difficult thing in an incredibly difficult way because they know, they believe that it will be to
the greater benefit. By that I mean, my students could go to public universities here in an educational system that they are fully familiar with because they've been in it since they were small children in Arabic. But instead they choose to come to an American university with completely different rules and regulations.
you know, the way we do things is what I mean. So essentially they're going to school in a foreign culture. They're doing it in English. I college is hard enough, but to do it in a different cultural paradigm, in a different language, when your friends down the street are doing it in their home culture paradigm in their native language, that's amazing.
to me. That's just incredible. I did not have the wherewithal at 19 years old to work that hard in life. I'll admit it. So that they're making this choice, I have amazing admiration for them. And I ask some of them why they do it. And of course, there are very pragmatic
reasons, know, English being the international language of business, wanting to understand the international. But for all of them, there is a values driven, undercurrent to it that they want to build a strong, safe, secure country. And part of the way they see doing it is by having
a secure economy. Strong economies are a pillar of secure nations. And they realize that. The history is recent to them. You may not know this, but our campus, the American University of Iraq, Baghdad, is
the grounds of one of Saddam Hussein's old palaces. This was Camp Victory. We have faculty who have pointed at pieces of lawn in different buildings and said, I was stationed here. They served here in the US military and now they're here teaching the next generation of students in a location literally that has such
fraught past and they are determined these students to rewrite not to not to forget history but to overlay it with positivity
Alejandro Juárez Crawford (46:56)
Mm
There's a theme that you brought out here that goes back to where you started in this conversation. And in my own mind, I call it choosing to be a fish out of water. Choosing to be alien in an environment where you don't know all the cues. Not everybody can immediately tell what you're thinking. Maybe people even look differently at you. You described choosing to be 42 years out
your culture of origin, right? And beginning with the wonderful point about your mother making others feel at home. And now you've just talked about your students choosing in order to build a different and better future for their country to forego all of the ease of education in Arabic in a cultural environment they understood.
You've really made me think about the choices we make to be a fish out of water, which are difficult choices. Nobody can just say, like when I was young, I used to think, yeah, I'll always be comfortable in an unfamiliar environment. I was so wrong. Right. Being in unfamiliar environments is really hard. mean, I I don't know. I grew up in New York City. Sometimes I've gotten back to JFK
which is a really awful place in general. And just like as the guard was being rude to me or something like that, I'm like, I'm home, right? You know, there's a sense of ease with that. But you've just made me think about choices to be a fish out of water and what they give us and what they enable us to give.
Mim Plavin-Masterman (48:43)
We were both consultants, you and I. mean, it sounds like we've all been consultants. No, I'm not. I'm actually trying to make the point that consultants are by their nature, a fish out of water. They come somewhere. hopefully bring other perspectives. They maybe bring best practices and help people in an organization get better at something. And then they move on. And I remember thinking when I was a consultant,
Alejandro Juárez Crawford (48:47)
What are you accusing me
Mim Plavin-Masterman (49:12)
when I got too comfortable somewhere, it was time for me to go. Actively, intentionally thinking, like, I love the people I work with, I love the work I'm doing, I'm too comfortable. I'm not out of water enough, now I'm in the water. Like, I need to go somewhere else. And there's a way that I felt like I had more distance to help solve problems if I was a little less familiar with the people that I was helping. So.
Alejandro Juárez Crawford (49:26)
Mmm.
What a wonderful flip. What were you going to say, Kate?
Kate O'Neill (49:44)
No, I was absolutely going to agree with that. It's that naive perspective, for lack of better term, that allows you, again, to seek the simplicity in the complexity. When you're not familiar, when you see all this complexity,
ahead of you, whether you're living in a host culture or you're a consultant in an organization, you need to look through that complexity to find the simplicity to understand what the true underlying mechanism is. You what is that root cause analysis? You know, that root cause.
Alejandro Juárez Crawford (50:26)
Ooh, so good.
That naive, wow, go on, go on. I was just gonna repeat your words.
Kate O'Neill (50:35)
And so, yeah, I think I agree with Mim 100 % that yes, it is uncomfortable, but again, it's that discomfort that pushes us to seek understanding. And as a consultant, it's, okay, let me find that root cause of what's going
That's the comfort, that understanding. And it's the same thing for me coming in, standing up, running business school, standing up programs. Okay, what is it that pushes my students to put themselves in uncomfortable positions? mean, just as my students here,
are choosing to study in a different educational paradigm in another language. It was the same thing in Afghanistan. It was the same thing in the United Arab Emirates when I started there. And with my faculty, why are they here? What is driving them to be here and to want to, again, leave their home culture as many of them, or if they are,
Iraqi, why do they want to work in this environment when it would be so much easier for them to be a faculty member in an Iraqi university? And my job is to, to again, to sort through the complexity, to find the simplicity, to find that root cause. And that creates that psychological safety. I mean, as leader, my job is I've got two roles.
to create psychological safety and to promote organizational stewardship. And I can only do that if I have a very clear vision of what's going on.
Alejandro Juárez Crawford (52:37)
Mm. Mm.
Kate, I've heard you speak about stewardship in terms of finding those shared values back of everything else, behind everything else. But I want to zero in on, as we come to a close here, a paradox and a question, a new paradox.
Ironically enough, MIMS point about consultants is the inside out flip, that's a term from formal logic, of the thoughts we were having on paper this morning and yesterday. We were talking about what can go wrong when a consultant sort of parachutes in, uses a bunch of powerful frameworks and analytical and communication tools, doesn't understand facts on the ground.
and yet dominates the conversation and even the strategic choices and direction, sometimes even eviscerates the capacity of the organization they're consulting with, right? And that's obviously a risk of saying this naive perspective of the new, you know, what you said, man, of coming into a situation, you've been there too long if you know it too well. That's obviously risk. But what you've brought out here, I'm literally just gonna repeat two things you said, Kate.
is the other side of that. And one is, I loved this line so much, that naive perspective that allows you to see the simplicity and the complexity, right? We started talking about intelligence, but it's almost like you need to be that fish out of water discovering what it's like to amphib, which is a technical term for becoming amphibian, right? And then you have this other amazing line where you say, what is it that pushes my students to push them, put themselves,
in uncomfortable positions? What is it that pushes them? And I wish I could ask you as a big double closing question. First of all, what do we do at a time when many of us are letting people make us so uncomfortable that we can't have a conversation? We're doing this across generations. We're doing this across political and ethnic groups in many countries.
where we can't talk because you're making me so uncomfortable that I can't even have a dialogue with you, right? So do you have any wisdom drawn from your experience, a story you could tell that might speak to those of us in cultures where there's a ton of division, in places where there's a ton of division right now, to bring us back to this incredible wisdom that I've just repeated in your words?
Kate O'Neill (55:28)
I think it comes back to what we talking about before, that intentionality of communicating this is what I'm doing and why I'm doing it. People want to...
Alejandro Juárez Crawford (55:42)
So wait, say I'm somebody who's busy just trolling people on social media, full of outrage and grievance, just feeling like just horrible people have taken over or are trying to take over my country, right? How do I bring that intentionality? Speak to me as that person. Is that too hard? Probably not for
Kate O'Neill (56:05)
Well, I tend to stay off social media, so that helps. But I will say, so, I mean, we have quite a, I mean, our faculty here, as in many universities in the region, are from all over the world. We all hold very different political,
Alejandro Juárez Crawford (56:09)
Listen to your mother and don't use social media. Sorry.
Mim Plavin-Masterman (56:10)
smart
Kate O'Neill (56:34)
social, religious, cultural views. And it's very common at dinner, you know, people will go to the cafeteria, they'll sit down, you know, at a big table, they may not, maybe it's somebody you know, maybe it's somebody you don't. But it's the intentionality of people sharing ideas with each other, even when they disagree.
And it's okay. Nobody tries to convince anybody to, to agree with them. It's just merely, yeah, no, it's really just saying, this is who I am and this is my experience. And then listening to the other person. And it doesn't have to be a conversation or a discussion. In fact, just the listening.
Alejandro Juárez Crawford (57:05)
Mm. Mm.
Yeah, that doesn't work, does it?
So it's a third, yeah, go, go,
Kate O'Neill (57:31)
is the effective part. It's the talking that muddles.
Alejandro Juárez Crawford (57:36)
So if I'm talking, I apply your earlier insight where you're like, I'm going to be very direct in this American style, right? And if it's our, you know, crazy uncle from ex -political or social persuasion, first of all, we actually listen to crazy uncle, right? No offense to the uncles out there. I really have an issue with uncles. Okay. No, I'm just kidding. We listen to crazy uncle. And then when we're saying our bit, we say, this might sound crazy to
but this reflects how I'm thinking about it and we can highlight that. Is this where you're taking us?
Kate O'Neill (58:12)
don't even know that it has to be so explicit. Just merely sharing this is who I am and this is what I believe or this is what I think and you know, let's go have a piece of pie. You know, maybe, I mean,
Alejandro Juárez Crawford (58:16)
Mm -hmm.
Kate O'Neill (58:30)
Again, we create complexity where it doesn't need to be
by trying to, yeah, listen to your mother. I mean, I mean, just the fact that, you know, when we try and ensure people understand everything we mean, the way we meant it, and really, we're not trying to get people to understand us. We're trying to get people to agree with us.
Alejandro Juárez Crawford (58:35)
Listen to your mother.
Stay off social media and have a piece of pie. What were you going to say?
Mm -hmm.
Kate O'Neill (59:02)
And that's where the complexity comes
Alejandro Juárez Crawford (59:05)
But have I convinced you, Mem, about the play point? No, I'm just kidding. So, Kate, you're just outstanding, wonderful, inspiring. I will add have a piece of pie to staying off social media and listening to my mom. Mom, I'm talking to you. This episode has been sponsored by Global Agribusiness. No. Kate, thank you so much.
I'm just really grateful to you and your mother for spending this time with us here today on What If
Kate O'Neill (59:41)
It's been great, thank you.